


sail your sea, meet your storm

by frostmantle



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: F/M, Gen, for now tho this is a friend shaped fic about friends, i think maxima and lyse would be very good friends and i'm soft for it, idk if i'm going to have them like actually be -together- together in this but, novel pair challenge, spoilers for stormblood i guess
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:02:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26163826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frostmantle/pseuds/frostmantle
Summary: Ships, passing in the night to moor in the same harbor.
Relationships: Maxima quo Priscus & Lyse Hext
Comments: 6
Kudos: 15
Collections: August Novel Pairing Challenge 2020





	sail your sea, meet your storm

**Author's Note:**

> The path you have chosen is paved with the dead. Either walk it with your eyes open or not at all.

It's early morning and she can't sleep.

The others have long since gone their separate ways and she is the only one still standing at the apex of the watchtower. Lyse stares morosely to the northeast, her eyes still fixed upon the running lights atop Baelsar's Wall. They blink in slow fixed patterns as they always have, and if she tries hard enough she can pretend as though nothing has transpired at all. 

She doesn't know why she should feel like this. She should feel as relieved as the others and she does to some measure, even over a mission with such mixed successes. The primal they feared would destroy the realm is not defeated but it is disappeared. The ancient mechanical beast awakened from its eons of slumber by Master Garlond and Nero tol Scaeva - and herself too, she supposes - in order to contend with it, likewise carried away to parts unknown. 

Ilberd's threat is gone. And--

\--so, too, is-- 

....Lyse still remembers the loss of her first milk tooth. She was eight summers old and still living in Sharlayan with her sister. She remembers idly wiggling it back and forth with the tip of her tongue almost constantly: during her training with Yda, daydreaming during her studies, drifting back and forth on a tree swing during one of the island's rare clear days. Wiggling and wiggling until one day, it was out. And there was a hole where the tooth had been, and blood, and for weeks after her tongue had drifted back over and over to wiggle that tooth, out of sheer habit. She still remembers that sense of strange and almost otherworldly emptiness, a mental displacement every time her tongue pressed and felt nothing.

Grown now, her hand slides over her nape, pressing against the empty space where the tattoo should have been and she remembers that sensation.

But it's not a tooth she's lost, it's her best friend. He was her tutor and her sister's close friend and partner, but over time he became all of those things to her too. She keeps encountering this loss around idle corners, cobwebbed closets in her mind she had thought long forgotten and sepia-toned nostalgia alike. He even lurks about those darker places she's kept carefully shut away from her waking hours for so long, jailed demons she has long since decided to let lie: a guardian to keep them aslumber.

He had been there when she'd lost that tooth. 

She bites down on a knuckle until the urge to cry passes.

  
~*~

Homecoming is bittersweet enough -- suspicious glares, anger, accusation, and rejection -- but this feels so much like the death knell, the final strike of a nail into a corse's coffin, that it is salt ground into the still-opened wound of her loneliness, raw and throbbing.

Rhalgr's Reach is burning. She crosses blows with a leashed hound: the woman leading the charge against her own people, little more than a girl herself in truth. Her eyes glitter with a smoldering bitterness that Lyse recognizes all too well, fierce and half-feral, her strident words gouging thorns to barb the blade in her hand. 

Her opponent is skilled but she cannot stand against the Warrior of Light and her companions. Fury and hate and _fear_ twist her features as she gives ground again and again, and they are on the verge of routing the invading force and it would have been all right, Lyse thinks, it would have been all right, they would have pulled it all back from the brink somehow if only things had gone differently.

If only _he_ hadn't come seeking his sport. Zenos yae Galvus, a beast in the skin of a man, a towering monolith of steel and sword. 

It's in him that Lyse finds her match: the most punishing blows in her arsenal more akin to a miner chipping into the face of a mountain before she is batted away with casual ease, not unlike a bored lion swatting down a cub. It's at his hands that Y'shtola, wintry Y'shtola, beautiful and cold, is cut down like so much chaff, and it's at his hands that the Warrior of Light herself experiences her first sound defeat; even she, that paragon of martial prowess, is only able to hold him at bay, and only for so long before the keen snap of that wicked blade crushes her defenses and slices through armor and into flesh. 

Her friend falls, lifeblood splashing over dry sandstone, hair and limbs splayed across the sand like a broken plaything. 

The viceroy quits the field, his amusement done, and his hound follows close at his heels, and Lyse is left clutching the tatters of a dying resistance as acrid blue-black smoke billows into the brassy afternoon sky.

~*~

The lord of Doma in exile is not the sort of man Lyse would have expected to be the heir to a throne. He is friendly and humorous and doesn't seem to have much in the way of a temper. 

Lyse certainly cannot say the same for herself. Nor for the leader of the Oronir who has subjected them to these petty indignities, seemingly for the tribe's Naadam preparations but more, she suspects, for his personal amusement. She is disinclined to think well of the overbearing Auri man, as is Gosetsu: both of them incredulous at Magnai's imperious airs. 

It is Hien who takes the matters in stride, at least as far as she can tell -- and Aurelia too, of course, though the Garlean rarely speaks her opinions one way or another unless someone asks it directly. Which Lyse does, once they are through the list of chores demanded of them in exchange for their release. 

The Warrior of Light smiles, and shrugs, and says,

" 'Tis a simple task. I have done worse than this before, and for far less reward -- and so too, I think, has Lord Hien. He is a proud man, but his aim is to see his people freed, and one does what needs must."

She feels something akin to shame and cannot say why.

~*~

The door to the Royal Menagerie's hanging gardens won't budge. By artifice or by simple neglect of the old king's grounds, it has stuck securely shut in the frame, and by the time Lyse and the twins' combined efforts have brought it down they are too late to render the Warrior of Light any aid. 

She sprints across the courtyard in time to see the legatus draw his blade across his neck, slicing open his own throat from ear to ear. Arterial spray splashes across crimson gerbera and the golden banners of his long hair, the strands that had lay artlessly scattered over his breastplate, flutter in the breeze like battle banners as he collapses. A bloodthirsty marionette with cut strings. 

Empty sky-blue eyes lay fixed upon her friend, guileless and blank as polished jade. His corse wears a smile that is soft and joyful and fulfilled, and utterly, utterly mad. 

Lyse thinks of Rhalgr's Reach, reduced to smoke and rubble. Y'shtola lying near death in a pool of blood. Poor Conrad Kemp, all but crushed by the toppling of the Imperatoris cannon. 

All of it to sate the bloodlust of a dead man who will never suffer a moment's consequence. 

She hates him.

~*~

The throne on the dais is ancient. It was installed by Anshelm Cotter and has borne witness to the reigns of kings for the turning of two Ages, and has even weathered the rule of an invading enemy, and it is here Lyse sits alone, cross-legged in the massive seat with Fordola's discarded blade across her lap with only her racing thoughts and crushing self-doubt for company. There will be no sleep for her this night, she knows, even as unimaginably weary as she is from the day's ordeal. 

Same old Lyse, she thinks bitterly. In the end, I still have not changed. 

She had thought this would be easier, somehow. That with the force of all her friends behind her, she would emerge victorious. They'd unite the country and then-

And then-

This was what she'd wanted, wasn't it?

She had decided somewhere down the line that the happy ending would simply write itself, Lyse supposes. Much like the ones in the fairy tales she had so loved as a child while growing up in safety far from these war-torn shores. Happy and vague and unspecified. A neatly concluded story in which Eorzea was united and the realm at peace and the Empire sent packing, its forces scattered to the winds like the salt egrets set aloft.

Perhaps she could even, somewhere in the fulfillment of her family's dream find happiness for herself. Everything had seemed so much clearer, with its own pure and burning purpose in the great scheme of things, when she had been younger and her burdens relatively few.

Only now does Lyse realize she had never really expected any of it to come to fruition. It has seemed so far away for so long that none of it has felt real. Papalymo's death, their victory, her own change of fortunes. She has spent her entire life in her sister's shadow: caught in a twilight existence that has kept her forever in limbo, neither Sharlayan nor Ala Mhigan, neither archon nor Scion. Neither Lyse nor Yda. 

And in much the same vein the liberation of her homeland was always some half-imagined dream. A dream she'd pursued in some form or other since she lost her sister, one that had been sidelined for a time by the Calamity and made manifest again only through Papalymo's final gambit to seal away a spectre of vengeance and twenty years of pent-up violence that had threatened the realm entire. 

A dark and ruinous thing that has, for better or worse, changed all of their fates.

 _If only you had not left us,_ she mourns. _There is much and more to be done for Ala Mhigo to heal, and I've still not the slightest idea where I should even begin to do it._

Her remaining friends have helped her more than they will ever know. Reliable and strong, they have never lectured her for her shortcomings and they have supported her decisions even when expressing their disagreement. But now, faced with old demons and the consequence of her missteps, she misses her old tutor as keenly as she misses her sister. Papalymo, she thinks, would have known what to do. Or at least could have talked her through this conundrum- and now there is no one. 

For the first time in her life, she is truly Lyse Hext. And for all her speech about forging her own path, she realizes its destination is one she will have to find for herself.

She buries her face in her hands, and listens to the howl of the wind around sandstone eaves until she can slip into a restless doze.

**Author's Note:**

> if you'd like to yell at me for my crimes against writing or simply meet like-minded people who love reading and/or writing stories about their adventures in hydaelyn, please feel free to join our book club! note: thirst for one (1) rat man optional. https://discord.gg/FB8hqkD


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